Bag of Bones (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bag of Bones is partly inspired by Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, but there's more than homage in this novel of horror and romance. Like du Maurier's Manderley, King's scary old place (on the shore of Maine's remote Dark Score Lake) is haunted by the late lady of the manor. There are many gory ghosts afoot, though: men, women, and wailing kids. The hero, a thriller novelist, stirs up hell's plenty of angry shades while investigating his wife's death. It turns out she either had a dark secret herself or was onto some dread scandal lurking in Dark Score Lake. As in King's previous book, Wizard and Glass, the fabric of reality is thin, and nosy narrators are in peril of plunging right out of this world and into a rather hostile otherworld.

Bag of Bones is a writer-haunted book, too. The spirits of Herman Melville and Ray Bradbury are deeply felt, and so are the tale's two romances (the hero muses on his marriage and falls for a young single mom with a marvelous, psychic daughter). There is also good-humored satire of the real bestseller book world--the hero complains that "the publicity process is like going to a sushi bar where you're the sushi." In its deep concerns with love, sprawling families, the writer's life, endangered children, and good old-fashioned storytelling, the book resembles a John Irving novel. It is also absolutely classic Stephen King, packed with nifty turns of phrase, irreverent wit, and lurid ghouls who grab you from beneath the bed while you cower under the covers. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

Carrying galley copy that avoids the h(orror) word while touting its "O. Henry Award-winning author," King's latest novel features a marketing campaign in accord with the distinguished pedigree of his new publisher. But has King written a book that ranks him as a literary heavyweight? Indeed he has, though not by forsaking his roots: the novel is a classic ghost story. It opens quietly as narrator Mike Noonan, 40, bestselling author of romantic suspense potboilers (and latest in a line of King novelist-heroes, cf. Misery and The Dark Half) describes the death of his wife four years back and his consequent grief and writer's block. Mike has kept the block hidden from the publishing world?limned in delicious detail, with real names?by annually pulling one of his own, unpublished mss. from a safe-deposit box. Now that he's out of old novels to submit, he resolves to work through his troubles at Sara Laughs, his country house in backwoods Maine. Arriving there, Mike nearly drives over a three-year-old girl. She is Kyra, granddaughter?by way of beautiful young widow Mattie?of mad computer mogul Max Devore, who is hellbent on snatching the girl from her mother. Taking up Kyra's cause, falling in love with Mattie, Mike gears up for a custody battle. Invigorated, he breaks through his writer's block; but great danger, psychological and physical, awaits, from Max Devore but especially from the spirits, mostly malevolent, that haunt Sara Laughs due to hideous crimes committed by Devore's ancestor a century earlier. Violence, natural and supernatural, ensues as past and present mix, culminating in a torrent of climaxes that bind and illuminate the novel's many mysteries. From his mint-fresh etching of spooky rural Maine to his masterful pacing and deft handling of numerous themes, particularly of the fragility of our constructs about reality and of love's ability to mend rifts in those constructs, this is one of King's most accomplished novels. It is his most personal as well, revealing through Mike's broodings the intimacies of the creative writing process: a passionate gift from a veteran author to all who care about the art and craft of storytelling. 1.26 million first printing; BOMC main selection (Sept.) FYI: Bag of Bones is the only hardcover Scribner will publish in September.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st edition (September 22, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684853507
• ISBN-13: 978-0684853505
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,171 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #93,153 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most incredible, clever book King has ever written., February 23, 2000

By	Andrew Percy (Woodbridge, Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bag of Bones (Mass Market Paperback)

Stephen King has been called the world's scariest novelist; however, many criticts agree that his work is too violent and his excessive use of adult language is not nesessary in his writing. However, while reading Bag of Bones, I ( having read most of his priveous novels) found that this one was different. The book is open for all readers: mystery, horror, suspence, and even romance. This book focuses on the events that happen to a widowed best selling novelist, Mike Noonan who is grieving from his wife's sudden and unexpected death. He suffers from writer's block; a case when writers fear their computers and are literally in pain when they try to write. He begins having a perpetual, repetative dream focusing on his dead wife appearing at the doorsteps of his Maine summer house he calls Sara Laughs. He packs up his belongings and moves into the old house in hope that he will ease up and begin writing again. Along the way, he meets a young woman, Mattie Devore and her daughter Kyra who are suffering from the death of Mattie's husband. Mike begins to notice supernatural occurrences that occasionally appear around Sara Laughs and realizes that they are there to help him (a) begin writing and get over the loss of his wife, and (b) help Mattie and Kyra escape from the clutches of her father in law, Max Devore who is trying to gain custody of his granddaughter. The book is incredible in that it begins a little unnearving, then towards the middle flattens itself out into a love story, and then wraps back up into King's typical scary ending. Where if you are reading in bed, late at night (as many King fans love to do) you will shutter at every noise you hear, and will be terrified of getting up, even to go the bathroom, because King has predicted this so he sets up his stories of normal people doing normal things like going to the bathroom. King also has experience describing Mike Noonan due to his own personal memoirs of his bestselling story life. This is one of the best books I have every read and you won't regret taking a few hours out of a few nights to read this.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Will Become a Testament to King's Literary Ability, August 7, 2002

By	Jason N. Mical (Bellevue, WA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Bag of Bones (Mass Market Paperback)

Many longtime King readers consider his early Magnum Opus, The Stand, the author's best work. Until the publication of Bag of Bones, that charge may have been true. No more. In BOB, King leaves cliché (both genre and his own) behind and weaves a classic, sprawling, and wholly satisfying tale of good and evil, right and wrong, love and hate, and the living and the dead.

Mike Noonan's life - and writing career - come to a crashing halt when his wife dies of an aneurysm while watching an automobile accident. For four years, he puts himself on neutral and glides through life, until he abandons his house for Sara Laughs, his summer retreat in Western Maine, on the shores of Dark Score Lake. There, he meets Mattie and Kyla, a single mother and her daughter who happened to get mixed up with the greedy, semi-psychotic computer magnate Max Devore, who wants Kyla, his granddaughter, as his own. Mike is inevitably drawn into the struggle, and at the same time finds that he, too, has a pulse and remnants of life. So too, he discovers, does Sara Laughs, a house that harbors spirits and secrets galore.

Part romance, part meditation on love and life, part legal thriller, and part satire of the writing industry, Bag of Bones is King's only pure ghost story. HP Lovecraft opined that any real ghost story is about love, and it is this, the most basic (and complex) of human emotions, that King explores - love for wives, love for children, and love of place. He keeps his easygoing style and voice, but the subject matter in Bag of Bones is his most contemplative and mature, and while it has elements of horror (some of the ghost scenes are throat-closers), Bag of Bones manages to grow beyond that into a very serious novel.

For a writer as maligned as King by the so-called literary-intellectual field, Bag of Bones could be a thumb-in-the-nose, look-what-I-can-do sort of book, but it escapes pretension and snobbery as well. Many of his books, written almost automatically in the 1980s and early 1990s, are downright formulaic, and there's a hint of that in Bag of Bones, but not much. It is also his best ghost story, as none of the main characters are psychics - just normal people who can experience ghostly phenomenon, making it all the more terrifying for the non-psychic reader. While The Shining pulled that off successfully, and Rose Red failed miserably, Bag of Bones keeps the hauntings grounded in something everyday people experience - that subtle, chill wind on a hot day, and noises in the night that may or may not be quite natural.

It's disappointing that King's retirement looms so immediately on the horizon, but if one book should stand as a tribute to his literary works, that book should be Bag of Bones. It's a wholly different beast from The Stand, the other book for which King will undoubtedly be recognized for hundreds of years in the future, but Bag of Bones hums with a kind of tightness and literary prowess rare in any book, in any time.

Final Grade: A

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars King's best work, December 8, 1999

By	eric graves (Kansas City) - See all my reviews

Stephen King is like a breathe of fresh air to modern literature, and yes I said literature. I truly believe that he will still be read a hundred years from now in classrooms as a kind of Dickens of our time, popular and written off by most critics, but endearing. His characterizations by themselves make him better than most writers today, and his imagery makes him one of the best. All through his career he has given us great things, but in this book it's different.

In Bag of Bones he gives us his best work so far, a great story, wonderful characters, and a surreal small town atmosphere that he can create better than any other writer alive today. Take the three parts at once dream sequence for example. This is not the work of a hack writing only for money, this is a riveting and extremely well-written section of a book filled with such parts. The rock- throwing scene by the lake was also especially good, showing the reader pure evil in mind movie realism.

People who have dismissed King should immediatly pick up Bag of Bones, they will find out what they have been missing by skipping him. It was wonderfully written, beautifully plotted, and actually quite creepy as well (the refridgerator magnets, the knocking on the basement wall). But then, who really cares if the critics like him or not, as long as people who know can recieve enjoyment from King's work. Read this book, and you'll be happy that you did.